There Came Both Mist and Snow (8 page)

Hubert looked about the bare attic. ‘Later I shall have to work in some sort of
décor
. A bedroom, I think – lavish, overfurnished, feminine.’

‘A big bed,’ interrupted Cecil – envisaging himself, I think, as depicted in bed with some monstrous pet.

Geoffrey nodded. ‘A sort of woman’s slipper, that is. And viridian, I should say, to tone up the whole composition.’

‘All the movement,’ said Hubert, ‘might start from the mule.’

‘What about Cecil
holding
the mule?’ demanded Geoffrey, as if suddenly inspired. ‘The viridian mule and his rather pasty hand: now just what would one get from that? Some rather interesting values, I should say.’

Cecil shifted uneasily on the single hard chair with which the attic was provided. ‘Really,’ he said, ‘I hardly think it appropriate to represent an unmarried man–’

‘But at the moment’ – Hubert was quite unheeding – ‘the interesting thing is the edges. In the big glass there will be the reflection of Cecil reflected in the cheval-glass. One should get some odd edges out of that.’

Geoffrey shook his head. ‘I think, Dad, it should be the other way round. Use the big glass as a powerful diagonal…’

Suddenly father and son were arguing fiercely. The servants, still standing about to shift the mirrors, stared; Cecil continued to wriggle; Lucy and I endeavoured to follow with the air of artists in a line of our own. And presently Hubert was flourishing his sketches in Geoffrey’s face. ‘You opinionated young puppy,’ he cried, ‘do you realize that I’ve been hard at work on the sort of thing for months – slaving at it till I’ve felt like Alice and the looking-glass? And then you come walking in from your flat geometrical pap and lay down the law! Get out of it!’ He turned round with a sweeping gesture. ‘And the rest of you too. You make the whole room a mess.’

We went – Lucy, Geoffrey, and myself down one staircase and the servants down another. There is nothing sinister in what is called an exhibition of artistic temperament, and the little performance put up by Hubert and Geoffrey was, if anything, mildly exhilarating. This could not be said of the quarrel into which we descended in the hall. Quarrel is perhaps the wrong word, for there was only one active participant. The thing might be called the Cambrell incident. Subsequently, it offered a good deal of matter for speculation. At the time, it was embarrassing merely.

A voice said: ‘Forty, perhaps?’ The tones suggested leisured debate; they rose, however, above the sound of footsteps briskly crossing an uncarpeted floor. ‘Forty-five.’ The voice was louder – partly because it was advancing through the inner hall at the end of which stood Basil’s study; partly because urgency was creeping into its smoothness.

A second voice offered a monosyllabic reply; the footsteps with deliberation for the outer lobby; Cambrell turned aside to pick up a coat and hat. The coat he began to put on; then he stopped and strolled across the hall to study a picture. ‘I’ve always admired your Guardi,’ he said casually. ‘It isn’t for sale?’

‘Yes,’ said Basil matter-of-factly, ‘it is.’

‘Fifteen hundred?’

‘Yes. Will you take it under your arm?’

Cambrell laughed dubiously. ‘I’ll send round, and I count myself thoroughly lucky – really grateful. Now surely forty-five is more than–’

Basil had got hold of Cambrell’s hat. He handed it to him. And because it was Basil the action was not rude; it was politely ruthless. ‘I prefer the other idea,’ he said. ‘And there’s an end on’t.’

His guest made that motion with his eyebrows which is the Saxon equivalent of shrugged shoulders and gesturing hands. ‘My dear Roper, of course you must decide as you choose. And I wish you all good luck.’

Nothing could have been more proper than this pretty speech; it relieved us of some of the discomfort we felt at stumbling upon what was none of our business as we scuttled hastily across the hall. And nothing more, I believe, would have happened but for the accident with the hat.

Cambrell dropped it – a clumsiness betraying suppressed emotion. He bent to pick it up, and as he straightened himself his face flushed dark red. ‘You damned fool,’ he cried, ‘even your idiot paint-splashing brother would have more sense!’

He was gone. Basil strolled over to the Guardi, glanced at it, and turned to me as I was disappearing into the library. ‘Do you think, Arthur, that Cambrell really cares for the arts?’ And as I made some inarticulate reply he took a notebook from his pocket. ‘Fifteen hundred,’ he said, ‘–and you are a witness.’ He smiled faintly and jotted with a pencil. ‘Every little helps.’

Tea, though not this time marked by the horror of intellectual games, was restless. It came into a library about which people were uneasily prowling and had no sedative effect. We balanced cups on inadequate ledges amid cliffs of books; wandering round the long dusky room we laid snake-like trails of crumbs across the floor.

Cecil was the centre of disturbance. I imagine that the roast duck had made him disinclined for further recruitment till dinner and that the sight of the Belrive muffins irked him. He had mislaid Law’s
Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life
: this ethical inconvenience he was allowing nobody to forget. Lucy too was on the hunt – first for her proofs in the coal-scuttle, next for her bag behind the clock, and finally for a great deal of note paper. With this last she proceeded to construct a dummy book of the blank-paged sort which publishers mysteriously find it expedient to create before they begin to set up type. Lucy’s idea was to mark in the chapter-heads and so, by turning over the pages, to get the physical feel of the chapters: the physical feel being a new aspect of her problem which had just occurred to her. We all helped to fold the pages into some semblance of the gatherings of a book; assembly was nearly complete when Lucy let the whole thing slip and the floor was littered with the debris of her project. This produced a mixture of polite scramble and acid comment – Wale leading the scramble, Anne the comment, and Wilfred being vigorously active on both fronts.

‘Has
nobody
,’ asked Cecil accusingly when this diversion was over, ‘seen my
Serious Call
?’

‘Talking of serious calls,’ said Wilfred, ‘I must write to a fellow about his margins.’ He began to prowl about peering into ink pots.

‘In his picture,’ said Geoffrey, ‘Cousin Cecil shall have the mule in one hand and Law’s
Serious Call
in the other. Behind him the concave mirror shall reflect a distorted version of Titian’s
Sacred and Profane Love
. It will be a problem picture in the hoary old manner and quite the success of the year.’ He nodded at his father. ‘Veteran painter’s perplexing vision.’

Anne put down her cup. ‘Sir Mervyn should have his place in the composition. Whither Cecil goes–’

I saw Wale looking more than startled at this impossible personality and judged it well to intervene hastily. ‘I have always felt,’ I said, ‘that tea is the turning point of the day.’

The remark was meant to be soothing rather than meaningful. But Anne considered it gravely. ‘A sentiment,’ she asked with deliberation, ‘which marks Uncle Arthur as of the turned rather than the turners?’

‘The day,’ said Geoffrey, ‘carries him on its great arc from morn to evening. And, supine, he murmurs such aphorisms as these.’

The gibberish of these young people was becoming wholly tiresome. I was about to brace my mind to the not-too-stretching task of evolving some more cogent witticism in reply when Anne took up her part in the verbal pit-pat again. ‘But what,’ she asked, ‘will Uncle Arthur do when Hesperus nightly cries banishment from the bed of his bride Belrive?’

‘The sword,’ said Geoffrey, ‘thrust between the sheets at ten p.m. sharp.’

‘Hurry up, Uncle Arthur, it’s time. Hurry up, please it’s time.’

Cecil, who had been poking after William Law’s masterpiece in a dark corner, turned round abruptly. ‘What extravagant nonsense are you talking, Anne?’

‘Haven’t you gathered? Cousin Basil is selling Belrive to Horace Cudbird to build the world’s biggest pub.’

‘On the contrary’ – Geoffrey shook his head – ‘he is selling the place to Ralph Cambrell to run more Cambrell benevolence. Cambrell houses, shops, and cinema. The week will begin with worship in a Cambrell chapel and end with football and hockey on Cambrell fields under the Cambrell code. A happy self-contained community financed by Cambrell all round. For the study of the ruins a Cambrell Archaeological Society will be formed.’

Cecil sat down abruptly. ‘Why ever should Basil do either of these abominable things?’

‘To reach the moon,’ said Anne. ‘Again, haven’t you heard? There is to be a great rocket winging through space. And Geoffrey and I are putting in for the job of pilots. Like the interstellar necking party in Wells’ film. We look at the moon and feel there may be a square deal in those argent fields.’

‘Actually,’ said Geoffrey, ‘the idea is to start a meteorological station in the Antarctic. A great deal of money is required: that’s what Basil’s appealing for. As human purposes go it has much to commend it.’

‘But surely’ – Cecil was looking round him in bewilderment – ‘Basil cannot legally–’

His brother Wilfred gave a muffiny snort. ‘I don’t believe a word of it. But if it were true I know who could stop him.’

‘Lucy, might I after all have a cup of tea?’

The voice at the door was Basil’s; the effect upon the company in the library was discomposing in the extreme.

‘If you will allow me to carry it off, that is.’

‘The
Serious Call
,’ said Cecil loudly. ‘I wonder if any of you have seen my
Serious Call
?’

Wilfred put down his muffin. ‘That fellow’s margins,’ he said. ‘Really must get off a note.’ He peered into the nearest ink pot.

I changed early that evening and was back in the library by seven o’clock. It would be half an hour before the dressing bell rang. But there was nobody about, and I concluded that most people had gone to their rooms early. When one has been only too much a member of a family a little solitude is a natural resource. And a large house can thus mysteriously untenant itself. In Lucy’s stories there is always some animation. The door – of kitchen, billiard-room, boudoir, pantry – is opened, and there on the other side is invariably somebody ready and eager to keep things going. Actually, such wanderings are likely to be lonely as a cloud. And this is particularly so with family parties, during which only servants are aware of how much time people put in skulking in their own fastnesses.

These are relevant reflections. Later that night I had stoutly to maintain against a good deal of covert incredulity that between seven o’clock and ten to eight I encountered no living soul at Belrive.

Of course I went out. And that I went out was to seem highly suspicious. We are all sentimental – and yet how unaccountable a dash of sentiment in one’s actions may make them appear!

I like the place in the dark. And – it is a sad admission – I particularly like the ruins in the phantasmagoric light of Cudbird’s bottle. Half-close one’s eyes in a fire-lit room and one can see what shapes one wills stirring in the corners and flitting across the ceiling; wander among the ruins in that fluctuating twilight of commercial enterprise and one can see cloister and dorter, night stair and warming-room possessed once more by those who first laid stone in the building of this ancient place. What daylight shows as crumbled chapel and a ruined choir one can dream of as a great design well begun.

At about ten past seven I opened the front door and stepped out on the terrace. It was icy cold: earlier in the day it had been chilly enough but now the temperature had suddenly dropped and I knew that we were in for a black frost. I hesitated and, stepping indoors again, secured a heavy coat which I had left in a cloakroom by the outer lobby. I found too my galoshes – the possession of such things dates me sadly, I fear – and slipped them over my pumps. I crossed the terrace and leant for a moment on its high balustrade. It will be as well to confess at once that I was in considerable agitation of mind.

Crossing the hall I had glanced at the square little Guardi which Basil had so briskly sold to Ralph Cambrell. For the painter I do not greatly care – he is a mannerist to my mind – but the impending disappearance even of this restless and inconsiderable heirloom startled me. The deal might have been over a red setter or a second-hand car.

And Basil was fond of that school; I remembered that he had once bought a Canaletto. Whatever his project was, he was in earnest. If Belrive was his to dispose of, it would go. And that Basil did not know exactly what he could, and could not, do seemed to me very unlikely indeed. I stared into the dark and tried to grasp the thing. He was just the man. And there was nothing vulgar or unbeseeming in the scheme. It had its own worth. Indeed, if one were to cast about in the modern world for something roughly analogous to the monastic idea the project of secluding oneself in a frozen solitude in quest of knowledge might be as near an equivalent as one would find. All this I realized.

I turned in my mind from Basil to his brother Hubert, the legitimate heir of everything around me. He had certainly been told: that was what he had meant in speaking of Basil’s formal dealing and expedition. How must he feel? Reviewing the day which had passed I concluded that he did feel something; his sombre mood linked itself to what was going forward. Instinct told me that not even to tap the energy of the atom nor yet to paint like Giorgione or Cézanne would Hubert Roper sell an acre his fathers gave him. But were his brother to do so would he protest? Would he passionately resent the thing? Would he accept it absolutely? Or would his reaction be somewhere in between? I made the chastening discovery that to the solution of this enigma not all my professional sense of character enabled me to hazard a guess. About painters – far more than about musicians – there is an absolute inarticulateness; they can communicate in pigment alone; this, maybe, serves to make them more baffling than most.